Still from Into The Violet Belly (2022) by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Harstad Kino, screen 2
In the book Women, Native, Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests a mode of writing which no longer reduces it to a means of expressing a reality or emitting a message. She suggests Mirror-Writing, a form of writing meshed with endless reflexivity, that constantly refers to other writings, and the process/nature of writing itself.
This film program, Commitments to Mirror-Writing, takes inspiration from this concept and features works by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. These films explore notions of language and other forms of expression as deeply tied to post-colonial processes of displacement, to decentered realities and cultural hybridization. The mirror here is not a metaphor for self-reflection or a two-way dialogue between "I and I." Rather, it is a shattered mirror—where multiple layers of reflection and refraction converge. This shattered mirror becomes a symbol of a language of rupture, representing multiple, fragmented identities.
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s film Into The Violet Belly (2022) moves back and forth between different voices, visual registers and timescales creating an image of multitudes. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Mouth to Mouth (1975) is a video meditation on how language can express nuanced feelings of displacement. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) is a richly layered, collage of the experiences of multiple generations of women. This confluence of voices refuses to choose a single, dominant narrative, yet ties them together through various cultural signifiers.
Commitments to Mirror-Writing is therefore structured as a transhistorical conversation between three feminist filmmakers, articulated through the language of their films. After the screening the artist Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and curator Abirami Logendran will continue the conversation in the cinema and also read poems and excerpts from Trinh T. Minh-ha and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s writings.
Films:
Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mouth to Mouth (1975)*
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Into The Violet Belly (2022)
*Collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation. Copyright: Regents of the University of California. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952, Hanoi, Vietnam) is an filmmaker, writer, composer and visual artist who lives and works in California, USA, where she teaches at the University of California, Berkeley’s Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric. Her practice explores cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and feminism. Her genre-crossing films have been variously described as ethnographic or political documentaries, essay films and allegorical feature films. She investigates themes of post-and-neo-colonialism, identity and filmmaking, emphasising process and ambiguity over direct message. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, her work has been exhibited and published widely around the world.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Pusan, South Korea) was a multi-disciplinary artist. From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, she created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Cha’s works included artist’s books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her collage-like book Dictée, published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity, and gender.
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi (b. 1988, Reutlingen, Germany) is a Milky Way-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of film, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary research. Collaborating with characters in search of consciousness, language, and freedom, her recent body of work explores the aesthetic, political, epistemological possibilities of image and sound. Having studied Fine Arts at the Städelschule and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is currently a PhD researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media, the University of Westminster and a fellow at the Junge Akademie, the Academy of Arts.
Abirami Logendran (b. 1992, Oslo, Norway) is an artist, critic and curator. She has master's degrees in screen culture from the University of Oslo and in visual arts from the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts. She is a film curator at Kunstnernes hus, film critic in Klassekampen and the editor of Norwegian Art Yearbook.